Defeated Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris studiously refused to make any concessions whatsoever to her party’s large left-wing progressive base, including on the important issue of genocide in Gaza. Now that Democrats are conducting their postmortems, the one thing they fail to acknowledge is that alienating your base voters and driving away 12 million of them wasn’t such a bright idea.
Democrats engaged in all sorts of histrionics during the 2024 presidential campaign, in which the centerpiece of their message was that Donald Trump represented a grave and existential threat to democracy and might even open concentration camps as a genuine fascist. Now that he has prevailed, there is no indication that they believed any of that. Why are they still here?
Defeat is an orphan. But defeated Democrats, themselves responsible for losing an election to Donald Trump that should have been easy to win, are flailing about trying to pin the blame on everyone but themselves.
Now that Donald Trump is coming back, there will be one positive side effect: many Democratic voters who sideline protests for social justice when the president is a Democrat, as he is now, will head back to the streets and take up the good fights they’ve been sitting out.
Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan. The phenomenon is accelerating as election postmortems that identify tactical and strategic errors in a campaign are going the way of the dodo bird.,
Remember when you first learned about the Holocaust? You probably wondered how so many Germans could turn a blind eye to the misery to the suffering inflicted by their government. Now, however, Democrats and Republicans are both happy to ignore the Palestinians killed by U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs.
A vote for someone who polls say cannot win a campaign, duopolists say, is a wasted vote. But how does one assess likelihood of victory with perfect precision?
The Democratic Party brief against third-party candidates like Ralph Nader and Jill Stein tends to boil down to the same tired group of clichéd criticisms: they’re egotistical. They only care about themselves. This election is too important.
Like a lawyer who bills by the minute, Kamala Harris never misses a chance to say as little as possible using as many words as possible. It’s not so much word salad as blather. It’s not so much stupidity as inconsideration of other people’s time. It’s really an unwillingness to get to the point, to focus, to…[cue AI language generation bot here].
Every election, including this one, Democrats like to say that it’s the most important election of our lifetime. Therefore, they say, we can’t possibly risk a Republican coming to power so we’re not allowed to vote for an independent or third-party candidate. That message might resonate a little more if they didn’t say it in every single election.
